The French government’s anti-piracy agency announced Monday (Google Translate) in a new report (French, PDF) that it wants to go even further. Hadopi (or another related government body) wants to expand the mandate to specifically target streaming and direct download sites. The report proposes a number of changes to the French enforcement regime that could clamp down further on sites violating intellectual property online.

As we’ve reported before, Hadopi has been controversial to say the least. Last fall, the anti-piracy agency successfully prosecuted the sole case to date that reached the third strike. The ridiculous result? A man—whose soon-to-be-ex-wife admitted (under oath!) that she actually downloaded two unauthorized Rihanna songs—was fined nearly $200.

“Unavoidable collateral damage to freedom of expression”

How would this new system work? It would require all sites to follow the example of YouTube and Dailymotion, engaging in proactive filtering, content recognition, and fingerprinting provided by copyright holders. (As we’ve pointed out, such systems are far from perfect—recall the recent example of Germans being unable to watch Russian meteorite videos on YouTube as a result of a copyright dispute.)

“In the event that it would not be possible to reach an agreement due to an apparent unwillingness of the host [to address the content in question], the public authority may decide to publicize the host’s behavior under the alert procedure given below,” the report states.

In short, sites that don’t comply with this government-imposed pre-emptive agreement could find themselves on the business end of a French three-strikes-style warning. The results could end in a domain name seizure or DNS and IP blocking.

The report also states that there could be new financial penalties.

In parallel [to other measures], and to encourage self-regulation initiatives, payment intermediaries should receive immunity for their cooperation [if they] suspend contractual relations [with the site in question] as a result of the proposed alert procedure.

In the event that financial intermediaries do not [respond to] alert procedures and engage in the self-regulatory initiatives, a judge or the public authority, in a manner to be determined to preserve the balance of interests, could force payment intermediaries to temporarily suspend their contractual relations, under certain conditions, with sites that have been subject to a warning procedure.

The French tech news site Numérama summed up (Google Translate) the proposal in one word: blackmail. The Paris-based Internet advocacy organization, La Quadrature du Net, has compared this new proposal to the defeated ACTA and SOPA measures.

“Currently confined to the fight against file sharing between individuals, Hadopi now wants to extend its control to Internet intermediaries such as hosting services, search engines, Internet service providers, or online payment services,” the organization wrote in a statement on Wednesday.

“Doing so could only lead them to actively monitor content shared on the Net, with unavoidable collateral damage to freedom of expression, the protection of privacy, and the right to a fair trial.”

So the country that gave us Montequieu's tripartite system 300 years ago, is now replacing that system with.......stroke of genius.....copyrightholders get all 3 powers. Wow. That's way better. Makes me wonder what people handing out that kind of power get in return.

You let them get away with the legislation thus far. They want more. Obviously, every bill is a stepping stone to the fully realized dream of forced consumption or detainment. Make sure everyone becomes a victim of their culture, viewing only the things you want them to.

How would this new system work? It would require all sites to follow the example of YouTube and Dailymotion, engaging in proactive filtering, content recognition, and fingerprinting provided by copyright holders. (As we’ve pointed out, such systems are far from perfect—recall the recent example of Germans being unable to watch Russian meteorite videos on YouTube as a result of a copyright dispute.)

Erm. Let's be clear here - that is a completely unrelated issue. That particular "fun" dispute is because, as you said in the other article:

The article you're citing and should have read wrote:

Germany doesn’t have an equivalent of the American fair use provision, which this would almost certainly fall under in the United States.

Let's like, actually pretend to be journalists here, out to you know, talk about facts. Yes, I understand they are terribly inconvenient for you.

Here's reality: such content systems are imperfect because you can make small changes in the source files (say, removing the intro or credits) and evade a checksum system, and even ones that check by section can potentially be evaded (though that is more work) and the latter system is more likely to turn up false positives (things that fall under fair use - though as pointed out, some countries lack fair use provisions, in which case there is no such thing as a false positive in those countries).

However, such systems do not NEED to be perfect to be useful, or good, or worth having and using. If you want to force everyone to do it though, you need to:

A) Exempt websites below a certain size.

AND/OR

B) Make acceptable software free to use.

There's nothing wrong with provisions like this so long as they are reasonably applied.

And everyone who is complaining: can you guys please like, not sound like insane pirates? Because when you rant and rave and use nothing but hyperbole, it makes it impossible for anyone to take you seriously who actually has half a brain.

Case in point:

vapur9 wrote:

You let them get away with the legislation thus far. They want more. Obviously, every bill is a stepping stone to the fully realized dream of forced consumption or detainment. Make sure everyone becomes a victim of their culture, viewing only the things you want them to.

Can we ramp down the insane paranoia? Slippery slope is always a terrible argument. Otherwise we can just say "Well, you want to live in an anarchy, have fun with your head on a spike." Its about as rational an argument.

Seriously.

The proposal is that streaming sites have to use automatic monitoring systems for content distributed in those countries. Is this really the end of the world? My sources say no, so long as (again) the provisions are reasonably applied (see above).

The problem with content ID is the heavy handedness and the new “troll” echo system that has developed. I do some photography and videography and here too many stories of us who put materials we own the copyrights to on YouTube and get hit with “Content ID Hell”.

Now you find yourself defending your livelihood on the order of thousands against an entity with spare capital on the order of billions. This is why I don’t directly post content for clients; I do the video of the event and let them deal with it.

To my knowledge none of the events I recorded have been hit with any kind nasty effects, but unless I’m mistaken at least one of the promotional videos got “monetized”. Even then I don’t think they got a strike for it.

Now my opinion of the horror of a French court:

1) Now imagine someone like me who actually owns the copyright on dozens of videos that will qualify under US law but under French law may require royalties. Now fight the fines and the strikes and the “disenfranchisement” from the internet in a French court, when you are 3000 miles away in the US and don’t make enough money off this stuff to buy a plane ticket.

2) How many of you have gotten a speeding ticket that was nothing more than local cops making local revenue. I Image the reality that France could see this as free Tax money from the US.

3) I want YouTube to block my stuff from France. Can it already do that? Or must we demand that we be able to block nations and/or regions?

The HADOPI is widly unpopular, ended up pretty much as tootheless as what critics warned when it was set up and more importantly it was created by the previous government. So everyone here thinks that agency is going to get killed by the new gouvernment (different party). By the way, that report was commissionated under the previous government.

Knowing that, everything that the HADOPI does is simply irrelevent, and they simply put out tons of reports to pretend they are still relevant and that they won't be shut down. Also, it's usually a good opportunity for us to laugh at their cluelessness (the HADOPI boss recently said it could be a good idea to put a tracker/blocker directly in the OS, but that "it might be difficult due to the involvment of non-French parties"...Oh really ?)